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Basic

Movie Basic Director John McTiernan Cast John Travolta, Connie Nielsen, Samuel L Jackson

By Subhash K Jha

Since his grand and expected comeback in Pulp Fiction John Tavolta has grown into one of the most watchable actors from Hollywood. In his latest film he plays Tom Hardy a boozed-and-blasé beefcake of a bully who was once a part of the American army and is now enjoying the hedonistic side of life with all he’s got. When there’s a crisis in the army, guess whom the yanks run to? In the Panamian jungle Sgt Nathan West (Samuel Jackson) has disappeared. And only Hardy can get to the bottom of the mystery. Sounds like a fabulous political whodunit, almost like a modernday version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of The Darkness. You almost expect Travolta to take off in search of Jackson, as Martin Sheen had done in Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. But apocalypse can wait. Director John McTiernan (who sculpted brawny-points for Bruce Willis in the Diehard series) is hardly in his element here. The plot material is dense, scrambled, incoherent and often depressing. Cinematographer Steve Mason shoots the film in smoky filtered light. The sound effects of missiles being fired, thunderstorm blowing through the soldiers’ hideout and roads lit with neon nullity, all add up to a film that wants to impress us with the externalities. Every location and character looks shivery and uncomfortable. There’s an absence of sunshine in the presentation which makes the whole give-and-take of wry rhetorics between interrogator Hardy and his unlikely ally Captain Julia Osborne (Connie Nielsen) unappealing and under-nourished. If you’ve seen earlier films about army intrigue like A Few Good Men and A Soldier’s Story and if you haven’t been confused with the Japanese-doll logistics of The Usual Suspects, you might enjoy the consciously confounding plot manoeuvrings of this dismally disembodied tale. About eighty percent of the plot finds Hardy clenching his fists to interrogate two scarred and scared soldiers (played by Brian van Holt and Giovani Ribissi) who know what happened to their platoon leader while he was wielding the whip in Panama. McTiernan’s direction is strictly in-your-face. There are no subtleties involved in the unravelling of the great Panamian mystery. The eyewitnesses to the bizarre incident are interrogated with selfcongratulatory cleverness which, we soon realize, is the on-the-job tone of narration. The ongoing frisson and the sense of underlining tension never obtain a state of liberation in the narration. Throughout we get the feeling of being trapped in to the espionage plot along with the characters. No one seems to want to get in let alone get out of the mindboggling mess. With every sequence the writer gets progressively sassy. Soon we are looking not at an thriller but a slick mimicry of a thriller where the people are acting secretive only for the camera. No one is straight in Basic. Everyone has a hidden agenda. A dry despair pervades the storytelling. The cast doesn’t help. Travolta and Jackson who played so well against each other in Pulp Fiction are caught in a gallery of grimacing grandeur. The frames are inviting, the situations are not. The romantic hint between Travolta and Connie Nielsen (whose first major screen outing this is) doesn’t quite grow. The first time she sees him he’s scratching his balls. "Can’t get any more unofficial than that," she comments wrily. Soon they’re on the floor writhing, but not in ecstacy. Fighting with fists clawing with words, Travolta and Nielsen are just not exciting enough to keep us watching and guessing about the denouement. When it comes, it comes with the look-at-me cleverness which is embarassing for its trawdry bravado. See Basic only if you’ve been following Travolta’s interesting career. This is Saturday Night Fever without the music, rhythm or synergy. Basic has a lot of attitude. But it doesn’t earn the right to preen. It’s much to smart-ass for its own good.